It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our Q&A show where each week a member of the team answers your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!

This week Allyn's back for a variety of questions:

00:26 - Samsung has said they are going to slow down DRAM and NAND production to keep prices high. Would Samsung be able to slow production enough to stop prices for the end consumer from falling further than they already have? Bonus question, how low do you think price per gig will go on TLC and MLC?

06:06 - I am building a new home desktop/server for Emby and it needs a new HDD. What’s the most important factor to consider: amount of cache, rotational speed, or SATA type? Regarding the CPU, would a Ryzen 5 or 7 be adequate for streaming up to four videos from the server at 1080p?

12:47 - Does higher L3 cache per core increase single-threaded performance? If so, does this mean for example that the i7-8700K has faster single-threaded performance than the i5-8600K if frequency is same and hyper-threading is off?

15:48 - The Spectre/Meltdown microcode updates hit Broadwell-E processors hard in terms of performance. In Windows 10 1803 you could hide the patch (KB4100347) and everything was fine. Do you know how this will work in Windows 10 1809? Is the microcode update still something that can be skipped, or is it rolled into the 1809 update?

20:21 - Are there any CPUs available now that have hardware-based fixes for Spectre and Meltdown? If not, is there a timetable of when they may be available?

24:28 - What are considered to be “silicone sensitive areas” within a PC or laptop? I’m looking to replace the TIM on my laptop (Lenovo E585) to cut down on fan noise and I saw that as a marketing bullet on some Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut.

Want to have your question answered on a future Mailbag? Leave a comment on this post or in the YouTube comments for the latest video. Check out new Mailbag videos (usually) each week!

It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our weekly show where Ryan and the team answer your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!

Allyn takes the hot seat this week to answer your storage questions:

00:23 - Would you worry about NVMe cooling? If you’re running video editing workloads, should you spend time trimming thermal pads on motherboard heatsinks to avoid overcooling the flash? Also, NVMe or Optane for an editing rig?

10:39 - I recently cloned my Samsung 850 EVO to a new ADATA SX8200. All was well at first, but when I formatted the EVO, Windows refused to boot and gave a BSoD. It would only boot once I removed every other drive from the system except the NVMe. Any ideas why?

13:51 - If I have a 3-year-old SM941 and it works fine, what kind of upgrade path do I have? MLC/NVMe are still good...better than TLC/QLC. So, Optane?

19:49 - What are the developments needed to give us even faster speeds than today’s NVMe? Where is the bottleneck that limits current speeds?

32:42 - Can you overclock SSDs? If so, what kind of positive and negative impacts would it have?

37:20 - Does regularly TRIMing an SSD extend its life? If so, how often should I run a TRIM command on my drives?

43:57 - Is there any negative impact on an SSD from leaving it connected to power at all times even when idle compared to only powering it up when I need to use it? I use an SSD for my wireless Samba server in my semi-truck to stream videos in my off time but most of the day it sits there doing nothing.

46:55 - Allyn, have you and Steve Gibson ever done a podcast or talk together?

Want to have your question answered on a future Mailbag? Leave a comment on this post or in the YouTube comments for the latest video. Check out new Mailbag videos (usually) each week!

It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our weekly show where Ryan and the team answer your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!

So, yeah, we missed a few weeks. We're going to blame it on Jim and his lack of pneumonia-proof lungs. What a loser. But, hey, they say whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Turns out that's not true at all.

Without further ado, the role of Ryan Shrout in today's performance will be played by plucky young up-and-comer Josh Walrath:

00:56 - Do you think we'll see AMD GPUs with ray tracing capabilities in the next few months to compete with NVIDIA?

06:06 - Has NVIDIA changed the yardstick for measuring GPU performance? The metrics until now have been higher frame rates at higher resolutions, but it seems we’re about to start prioritizing ray tracing performance instead. Would a gamer playing today at 4K or 144Hz consider it a downgrade to switch to 1080p with ray tracing? Will consumers who invested in 4K and high refresh rate displays feel cheated by the shift to ray tracing, even though there are only a handful of supported titles scheduled for the near future?

11:46 - Would you rather see companies push to truly achieve mainstream 4K HDR 60fps performance with better textures and polygon counts instead of this new shift to ray tracing?

14:11 - I recently added a Samsung 970 EVO to my system, but I wasn’t able to install Windows on it unless I disconnected all of my other drives first. What could have caused this?

17:01 - Is anyone else unable to map a network drive in Windows 10 after upgrading to version 1803? Did Microsoft kill off HomeGroup without sufficient testing? Help!

18:48 - Why do different types of RAM work better on Intel or AMD platforms?

20:57 - Do you expect the new Intel HEDT refresh parts to hold the higher frequencies at the same power level as before? And if so will that be down to the soldered IHS or more of the actual improvement in the cores/chip? Will the “optimization” provide an IPC increase?

It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our weekly show where Ryan and the team answer your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!

It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our (mostly) weekly show where Ryan and the team answer your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!

It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our weekly show where Ryan and the team answer your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!

Yeah, OK, we missed a few weeks. It's all Jim's fault. Anyway, Ryan's back to tackle these questions:

It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our weekly show where Ryan and the team answer your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!

It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our weekly show where Ryan and the team answer your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!

It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our weekly show where Ryan and the team answer your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!

It's time for the PCPer Mailbag, our weekly show where Ryan and the team answer your questions about the tech industry, the latest and greatest GPUs, the process of running a tech review website, and more!